To Fire Called (A Seeker's Tale From The Golden Age Of The Solar Clipper Book 2)

by Nathan Lowell

  “All right,” Pip said, and indicated a slot in front of him beside the banner. “Line up.”

  The first three all had no green votes but after that he started finding people with the requisite combinations of green stickers. Pip pointed them to the corner where Al, the chief, and I stood propped up against the bulkhead.

  I pulled out my tablet and grabbed their idents while we waited for Pip to finish screening the remaining candidates.

  “How soon will we know, Captain?” an able spacer asked.

  Her name tag said Christi Reed. “Maybe tonight. We need to see how many of you we can collect from the group at large.”

  “What are you looking for?” another asked.

  “Ms. Torkelson, right?” I asked.

  “Yes, sar.”

  “We’re looking for people who’ll fit in and have the skills we need.” I shrugged. “Simple, really. We’re just getting the ship out of a four-month refit. We had a few people stay with us during the hiatus but we need a full crew who’s willing to sail with us.”

  Reed asked, “Why wouldn’t we be willing to sail with you, Captain?” The look she gave me turned dark.

  The chief stepped up. “You ever hear of the Empress Nicole?”

  Most of the growing crowd in our corner shook their heads but a couple of people stared at Chief Stevens like she’d just farted and was trying to blame somebody else.

  “Mel’s Place?” the chief asked.

  The same people shook their head but those who’d looked askance before began sharing looks with each other.

  “Dark Knight Station?” she asked.

  “Toe-Holds,” somebody in the back said.

  The chief nodded. “Some of you know exactly what I’m talking about. We’re not at liberty to get into the details now, but we’ve got a good ship, a great captain, and we need a crew to fly with us.”

  “Even if it’s into the Toe-Holds?” that same voice asked.

  “Even if,” the chief said.

  “Wait a tick, sar. Are you Chief Engineering Officer Margaret Stevens?” a man in the front asked.

  “I am. Who are you?” the chief asked.

  “Able Spacer Chong Go,” he said. “You’re not the Dr. Margaret Stevens who wrote the books on engineering, are you?”

  “Yes, but not many able spacers know that.”

  “I wanted to be an engineer since I was a sprout,” Go said. “I read everything you’ve written.”

  “Even my Treatise On Harmonic Resonances Across Burleson Emitter Frequencies?”

  He frowned for a moment, staring at her. “No, but I read your Harmonic Frequencies. It was about shipboard vibrations caused by sympathetic resonance amplification of fusactor-capacitor coupling problems.”

  Al looked at the chief. “You have a fan.”

  The chief grinned at the man. “Why didn’t you go into engineering?”

  “No berths. I got started as a spacer apprentice and just worked up the ladder over the last stanyer.”

  The chief looked at me. “Mind if I poach this one?”

  I looked at the growing throng gathering around us. “I don’t remember tagging half these people,” I said. “But it’s been a long night. Be my guest.”

  The chief pulled Go out of the line and they got their heads together off to the side.

  Pip joined us soon after that and grinned. “That’s all of them,” he said.

  “If you’ve given me your ident, you can go,” I said. “We’ll do callbacks tomorrow and Thursday. We’ve only got a few slots to fill, so some of you will be disappointed, but at least you know the odds. If you haven’t given me your ident yet, step right up and we’ll get you out of here.”

  The last applicant left and the four of us took a collective deep breath.

  “I’m exhausted,” Chief Stevens said.

  Lori came up from the back of the room. “If you’re done, we can close up the front,” she said.

  Pip nodded. “Yes, please. How much extra do we owe you?”

  “Two hundred for tonight.” She paused before asking, “Do you want Thursday?”

  Pip looked at us before answering. “I think we got what we wanted this time around,” he said. “Let me have the bill, and we’ll clear out. Thanks for being flexible.”

  “You’re very welcome. I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

  “First time for us, too.” Pip shrugged and had the decency to look a bit sheepish.

  Chapter 6

  Unwin Yards: 2735, January 11

  After four grueling days of interviews, callbacks, and decision-making, we finally had a complete crew roster. For all its flaws, Pip’s badge-and-sticker plan had given us a good pool of candidates. I wouldn’t say I wanted to take them all, but some of the choices proved to be tough.

  Sharps, Franklin, and Adams had ridden over with us on the tenth and begun the process of bringing the galley up to snuff. The yard offered us one of their crew shuttles between shift changes so we could get everybody else aboard in a single go.

  I met them at the shuttle dock at 1330. Al got off first and grinned. “They’re not terribly excited.”

  “Seriously?” I asked.

  She just chuckled and shook her head. “I’ve seen boxes of kittens with less enthusiasm.”

  They streamed out of the shuttle and I shook every hand that came off. I couldn’t help but remember my own first day as a spacer, walking through the orbital at Neris and thinking how strange everything was. If it hadn’t been for Pip, I don’t know what I might have done. This wasn’t the first day for any of these people, but every single one of them thanked me for hiring them on.

  As the last of them disappeared down the passageway toward the ship, one of the yard pilots came along to reclaim the shuttle. “Crews always look glad to leave the ships, but twice as happy to come back,” she said.

  “Being beached and watching your credits drain away is daunting,” I said.

  “True, but it’s still more fun to watch them come aboard than it is to watch them leave.” She nodded to me. “Safe voyage, Captain.”

  “Safe voyage,” I said as she ducked through the lock and into the shuttle.

  It gave me a lot to think about as I followed in the noisy wake of my new crew.

  When I got to the ship, it still seemed wrong to walk in through a lock that didn’t have a watchstander behind it. I hadn’t been able to shake that feeling of wrongness the whole time we’d been at the yard. With a couple of weeks left before we’d be able to move the ship to Dree Orbital, we’d have plenty of time to remedy that problem. I made my way through the ship to the mess deck where the aroma of fresh coffee convinced me to pull a cup from the urn before sticking my head into the galley. Adams saw me and said, “Captain on deck.”

  “As you were.” It wasn’t a ceremony I had grown used to and still felt a bit odd when somebody made the call.

  “How can we help you, Skipper?” Sharps asked, wiping her hands on her apron.

  “Just checking in. You probably heard the new crew come aboard.”

  “Yes, sar. We got the chandlery order yesterday to replenish perishables and round out our pantry a bit. The yard did a good job keeping our existing stuff from thawing. We finished stowing everything this morning.” She looked around. “I think. It’s been a bit hectic, but we’re planning on full crew for dinner mess. Ms. Adams will cover the wardroom service, if that’s satisfactory?”

  “Quite. Thank you.” Looking around at the shining, spotless galley with new cook tops and upgraded ovens made me smile. “Some days I miss it,” I said.

  Sharps grinned. “The galley, sar?”

  “Life was a lot simpler when all I had to deal with was an empty coffee urn.”

  “Yes, Captain. I can see where that might be the case.” She looked around. “I’ve no desire to leave. As challenging as it can be to cook for thirty odd people in the middle of space, I don’t think I’d ever want to stop.”

  “We’re lucky to h
ave you, Ms. Sharps.”

  “I’ll let Mr. Carstairs know if there’s anything we need,” she said.

  “Carry on, Ms. Sharps.”

  “Aye, aye, Captain,” she said.

  I turned to go but stopped at the door to the mess deck. “One other thing, Ms. Sharps?”

  “Yes, sar?”

  “If Mr. Carstairs approaches you with some odd-sounding plans for your deep stores? Give him a good listen?”

  She blinked a little bit. “All right, sar. I certainly shall.”

  It felt strange walking through the ship, knowing we had a full crew aboard and not seeing anybody in the passageways. The smell of new plastics and fresh paint clung to my nose. I had to admit it was marginally better than the stink of welding torches, but only marginally. I swung into deck berthing and a spacer just inside the hatch shouted, “Captain on deck.”

  “As you were,” I said, loud enough that I hoped everybody heard. “Any issues down here?”

  Al came out from one of the quads. “A bit of a bind on this one bunk. Nothing we can’t handle, Skipper.”

  I lifted my mug in a toast and left. I had to get out of the habit of walking all over the ship whenever the mood struck me. I had officers who dealt with the details and my presence—concerned or not—didn’t help that. I climbed the ladder to the cabin and settled in for an invigorating game of “catching up on reports.”

  My coffee was gone long before the last report was, but after three solid stans of mind-numbing routine, I had to stand up and walk around before I fell asleep.

  I started with a walk down the spine to engineering. The spine always felt a little colder than the rest of the ship to me, and I used that chill to try to get some blood flowing. I found Chief Stevens hunkered over the console in her office. She looked up when I knocked on the door frame.

  “Skipper. What brings you to this end of the universe?”

  “Reports,” I said.

  “Reports? Whose reports?”

  “My own. If I didn’t get up and move, I’d have fallen asleep.”

  She laughed. “I know that song too well.”

  “I’m not interrupting anything chiefly, am I?”

  “Chiefly?” She laughed again. “Not hardly. Just checking spare-parts records and tankages. I checked in a whole pallet of parts today. I should have waited for the crew. It would have given them something to do.”

  “Still a couple weeks until we can leave?”

  “Latest report from Dakota said the twenty-third.”

  “What do we do with the crew until then?” I asked.

  “I’m organizing the watch schedule. Assigning people to sections. There’s not much to do here now, but there never is when the ship’s tied up.” She shrugged. “I’ve got Penna organizing engineering berthing at the moment. We’ll do some training drills and make sure everybody has the knowledge their rank says they should.”

  “Good idea. I may steal it.”

  “You might as well. I stole it from somebody else.”

  “I stuck my head into deck berthing. Al’s taken the lead there. Did I see you added Go in as a mechanic?”

  She grinned. “I did. He’s not actually got the rating yet. The next exam period will come by before we leave here. I’ll send him over to the Orbital to take it.”

  “Can he pass it?”

  “I gave him the sample test. He blew it out of the lock.” She grinned. “I’ve got him studying for spec three fields now. He’ll have that down by the time he can take the test again.”

  “By the way, what was that title you gave him at the screening?”

  The chief looked blank for a moment. “Oh, the treatise on whatever it was?”

  “Yes.”

  “Bogus. I get a lot of engineering types sucking up.” She clasped her hands under her chin and made her voice squeaky. “Oh, Chief Stevens! I’ve read all your work and you’re a genius!”

  “So you feed them a title that you didn’t write?”

  “Yeah. More reliable than asking them about one I did. The posers almost always say, ‘Of course, Chief,’ while the legit engineers look like I’ve just told them there’s a new volume of Sex and the Single Mechanic that they didn’t know about.”

  “Is that a thing?”

  “Oh, dear boy. You’ve led a charmed and sheltered life.” She grinned at me.

  That grin made me laugh. “On that note, I need to get back to the reports. I’ve two weeks to catch up on all the stuff I haven’t done since this morning.”

  “Good luck,” she said. “Reports breed faster than fertile reactors.”

  The metaphor had me scratching my head all the way back down the spine. When I settled back into my seat on the console, I had to admit the yard had done a great job making the space bright, clean, and up to date. The new consoles blazed through the work and my new chair felt comfy enough to sleep in.

  But when I looked around the empty, largely sterile, compartment, I felt a pang of regret. I looked over my shoulder at the blank bulkhead that would have been an armorglass port on an Unwin tractor. I knew that the cabin lay meters back from the bow of the ship, almost directly under the bridge. From a design standpoint, it made perfect sense. My logical mind kept fighting with my emotional one, which insisted there should be a port there.

  I tried to picture the cabin on the Tinker after Fredi moved in. Her tea service. The artwork on the bulkheads and around the cabin, even on her desk. I looked up at the blank spot above my desk and smiled.

  I crossed to my grav trunk, the only one left after I unloaded all of Pip’s empty Clipper Ship Lager bottles, and pulled out my master’s license. I’d been living aboard for a week, but hadn’t unpacked more than a change of shipsuits and my hygiene gear. I looked around at the blank bulkhead panels for a moment before the console bipped with a new set of reports. I stuck the license back in the trunk for the moment. I’d get to it.

  Chapter 7

  Dree Orbital: 2375, January 25

  Moving the ship out of the yards and docking at Dree felt like coming home. “Secure from navigation stations, Ms. Ross. Declare liberty as soon as we’ve cleared customs, if you please,” I said.

  “Aye, aye, Captain,” Al said.

  I stepped out of my chair and dropped from the bridge to clear the way for the crew trying to be ready to go ashore as soon as possible. After two weeks mostly cooped up in the ship while it remained tied to the maintenance docks, the urge to get out felt nearly overwhelming. It wasn’t that we’d been cooped up aboard ship. We’d spend weeks at a time locked in between ports. It was being tied to a dock, mere kilometers away from a perfectly good orbital with all the delights such a metropolis provided but just tantalizingly out of reach.

  I remembered port-side watches as being deadly after just a few days. Two weeks in a row left much of the crew mentally moribund.

  Customs clearance proved to be pro forma and within a few ticks I heard liberty being announced though the ship. The berthing areas lay too far away for me to hear but I imagined the sound of cheering. I settled into the chair behind my desk and contemplated the message queue. It stood empty except for the local traffic notices, the final bill from the yard—which I forwarded to Pip in case he didn’t already have it—and little else, for a change.

  It felt odd sitting there in the near quiet. A faint whisper from the blowers, now reduced to minimum again. No workmen hammered the ship’s ribs or beat on its skin with rubber hammers. The propulsion system lay back there at the other end of the fragile spine, ready to thrust us unbelievable distances into the Deep Dark at my command.

  The chrono clicked over to 1715. In the galley, I knew Ms. Sharps would be wrapping preparations for a port-side dinner mess after two weeks of feeding the crew three times a day. It felt good to get a routine down, even if it wasn’t the routine of a working vessel yet.

  The cabin was a box to keep the captain from rattling around in the ship, disturbing the crew like a loose marble in the overhead, roll
ing back and forth with the minute shifts of gravity and velocity too small for the human cargo to detect but enough to drive them mad unless somebody found the small glass ball.

  I wondered when I’d grown so dark.

  The terror of sailing the ship from Breakall, coupled with the need to stand too many watches over too short a period of time, had left no room for navel-gazing at the time. I never felt that way in the small ships where the officers outnumbered the crew. The Agamemnon with her custom-painted cabin. The Iris.

  How long had it been since the Iris? A little more than a stanyer since I left her. A little more than eighteen months since Greenfields. Herring—or Patterson, whatever his name—had disappeared like smoke in the wind. Gone down the Toe-Hold rabbit hole where TIC held no sway, no power. Gone and leaving me staring at the walls of the cabin on a ship once filled with ghosts.

  Who was the captain who occupied this cabin before he died? Did I even know his name? I couldn’t remember.

  I closed my eyes and saw her as I always saw her. Sapphire daggers that cut my heart so that it could beat. So that I could live.

  I heard the cabin door latch snick and opened my eyes to find Pip standing there, staring. “From the sublime to the ridiculous,” I said.

  He grinned his brilliant grin and gave me a flourishing bow. “Jester extraordinaire,” he said. “At your service.” When he straightened I noticed the grin didn’t reach his eyes. He threw himself into one of the visitor chairs and propped his boots on my desk.

  “What are we doing?” I asked.

  “You mean, like now? For dinner maybe? Or are you speaking in a more existential context?”

  I chuckled. I couldn’t help it. “Any of the above.”

  “Personally, I’m ready for some fine dining port-side on the company’s dime.” He grinned again and the gleam returned to his eye. “Since I’m the CEO, I approve the expense.”

  “Does the company have any cash left?” I asked. “That last bill had a lot of zeros at the end.”

  “We do, thanks in no small part to my partner’s deep pockets and the foresight of our illustrious board of directors.”

  I stared at Pip for several long moments. “What’re the odds of finding him?”